Mitt Romney Sets His Twitter Location to Thirstyville

On Tuesday, Senator Orrin Hatch announced he would retire from Congress after serving for four decades. While normally the headline "Utah senator retires" would be pretty banal, this one has the added twist of thrusting Mitt Romney back into the national spotlight.

Romney is widely seen as having the likeliest shot at replacing Hatch. It's also extremely likely he'll have some insane, Steve Bannon-backed primary challenger since Breitbart leans pretty heavily on the idea that Romney represents everything wrong with the Republican establishment. Obviously, this is still speculative. But Romney is clearly thirsty for this, and all the evidence you need for that is right in his Twitter profile.

Now, Romney has earned a reputation as a "Trump critic" because he's called the president "a phony," which for Romney is just shy of an f-bomb. And while that's all it takes these days to be a "reasonable Republican," there's no reason to assume that Romney would oppose Trump in any kind of substantial way. Nate Silver pointed out that Romney's approval rating in Utah is 20 percent higher than Trump's, which would give him cover to defy the president. While Silver's looking at it through the lens of a potential Romney stab at running for president in 2020, the question remains: what exactly would Romney defy Trump on? Would he have voted against Neil Gorsuch's Supreme Court confirmation? Would he have opposed the GOP's tax monstrosity, which is only slightly more unhinged than his own presidential platform?

Since taking office, Trump hasn't tried to do much that rank and file Congressional Republicans actually oppose. He's just crasser and not as low-key a racist as many of them would prefer. Just look at John McCain: he may occasionally have a subtle burn for him, but he still votes for whatever Trump wants more than 80 percent of the time. Famed Trump disliker Marco Rubio? He votes with Trump more than 96 percent of the time. Ted Cruz isn't even put off that Trump went after his wife. Hell, Senate Republicans won't even reject Trump's bottom-of-the-barrel judicial nominees.

So it's ultimately besides the point whether Romney chooses to schmooze with Trump to be Secretary of State or condemn Trump to look like a better presidential candidate. Either way, as a senator, he'll be a hard fighter for plutocrats everywhere.

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